Music > Interviews
Interview with Submotion Orchestra
05/09/12
Here’s an idea: don’t cut money from the Arts Council. Their vision of a live dubstep gig in York Minster pulled together various musicians from the Leeds jazz scene for a commissioned night, the fruits of which bore the seeds of Submotion Orchestra as we know them now, one of the country’s most talked about live acts. We can thank Arts Council, but none of it would’ve been possible without the band’s founder, Tommy Evans…
You’re playing the PLUGG night at Open, which has previously hosted Gilles Peterson, a man who’s been a big supporter of yours so far… Yeah, he’s been really supportive of us in the past. We did a Maida Vale session for him last year, or a couple of years ago, which was wicked and yeah, he’s played a lot of our tracks on his radio shows – he’s a nice guy.
So Tommy, where are you at the moment? Are you in Leeds? No, I’m in London. The band’s split now between Leeds and London, which is a bit of a difficult one; there’s three of us in London and four of them in Leeds. The band started in Leeds but we’ve kind of spread out since then. At one stage we were split between three cities, which was even worse, so there’s a lot of logistics to keep the whole operation moving forward. But yeah, I’m in London, I’m currently writing and gearing up for our tour in October, which we’re really looking forward to, as well as the gig in Norwich in September.
Are you writing for a new release? Well basically I write for a whole load of different projects, not just Submotion actually, but we’re writing material for the third Submotion album at the moment, even though the second one’s not actually out yet. The second one is out on the 8th of October and we’re all really excited about that; it’s sounding really cool and the singles have done really well and the remixes of the singles have been good and gone down really as well, which is great. So it’s a good start and we’re all really looking forward to touring that, but these things take such a long time to sort out in terms of the first idea you have for a tune, then the whole writing process, takes about four months – I mean, not every day for four months – but you build it very slowly then take it to the band, rehearse it up, then nine times out of ten the band don’t even like it! So if it makes it through that harsh filtering process, you then rehearse it up ready to play, then by the time you’ve played it out a few times and decided you want to stick it on the album, that whole process takes eighteen months, so we’re starting to write material from the third album before the second one has even come out, which is a slightly odd thing to be doing. But it’s cool; it keeps the focus and the forward momentum, which is what’s necessary.
You mentioned the filtering process - I did read actually, that you all pull it in different directions. Like, Ruby will pull it in a neo soul direction… What’s the one thing that brings you all together then, the one leveller between you all? That’s a really good question; I think probably everyone’s love of Jazz on a musical level. We are all trained Jazz musicians, so that’s the one thing we all share but then because Jazz is such a broad thing in itself, there are so many different levels to the sort of music we all like and there are lots of different crossovers between us all in terms of influence and training and stuff like that. I would say that Jazz is the one common thing and we have an awareness of playing in a conversational way with a focus on improvisation, an awareness of what is going on around you. None of us are really session players, as such, but we all do bits of session work; it’s basically a jazz band trying to play electronic produced music, a weird little combination that we find ourselves in and it kind of works, I think.
If you take that free form element from jazz, how do you then discipline yourself when you get into the studio where you have to rein things in a little bit, or do you rein things in at all? Yes and no - you would have to speak to our producer about that! To start with, with the live show, the way it works is all of the tunes, on one level have a very set structure, so they are a musical signpost the whole way through each tune, and various keys and stuff like that. And in between all of those signposts and between those keys/cues, there is a lot of freedom and a lot of space for interpretation for this kind of conversational jazzy approach. That is how we deal with the live show. In terms of what goes on, on the album, we have to knuckle down and tighten up for that. It’s not a question of trying to replicate produced music at all or electronic stuff, it’s certainly taking a lot of influence from bass-heavy electronic music. I mean, dubstep is often what we are closely associated with but I think we probably try and distance ourselves as far from that as possible right now. It’s that dancefloor mentality, that bass up mentality that we have in the studio, a more improvised approach than we take to the live show.
It’s interesting you say you are distancing yourself from dubstep; dubstep has almost distanced itself from itself hasn’t it? It’s one of the most quickly evolving genres I have ever experienced, but there was just something about the musical landscape a couple of years ago that started to produce different bands. I wanted to know what you were doing just before Submotion Orchestra? Did you also feel like it was getting to be the right time for you to do something like this? Before Submotion, everyone in the band was doing a range of different stuff from jazz to funk to soul to reggae to blues to dub to classical music to whatever, y’know, everything. Myself, I was and still am playing for a band called Gentlemen’s Dub Club. I also run my own orchestra, it’s a fifteen piece jazz orchestra that I compose and conduct for, and various other smaller jazz ensembles, composing for dance and film, and lots of other bits and bobs. But three, four years ago when I first had the idea for Submotion, I was playing a lot of dub music, a lot of quite underground, dubby, reggae raves and club nights and stuff, which was cool, and then a completely other world with all the jazz stuff. I thought there must be a way to bring these two worlds of music that I love together, ‘cause they are very different in a lot of ways, but there are some crossovers and it was around this time that I started hanging out with Dom Ruskspin, who’s the other guy that started the band, and we did a project in a cathedral in York, which was pretty weird, but got us thinking about doing some live dubstep thing. It was around the time that Burial was starting to take off and it was those kind of albums, like, there was just something in it that was like, ‘right, that would be really easy to do live’, like, it would be easy to replicate with fairly stripped back grooves and maybe some vocal on top. It felt like there was enough of the bass that I wanted to bring in, plus interesting harmony and complex elements from the jazz side of things that could actually work quite well. I wanted it to be quite a soulful, sexy, down-tempo project, which it kind of has turned out to be, although very different from what we originally envisioned it as.
I would love to have seen that gig at the York Minster – I think it’s great that the Arts Council in Yorkshire are forward thinking enough to commission that kind of project – was it an amazing gig? To be honest, it was incredibly chaotic. It was good, but it could have been incredible; the line-up was just ridiculous, I was live on drums, then there was a live bass and live synth bass player, viola, cello, trumpet, saxophone, two opera singers, the organist in the cathedral – so, like, the full organ playing in the cathedral at the same time. There was like a 16-piece African Gospel choir, the grand piano… it was just like the most weird ensemble! Myself and Dom had been asked to write the music for it, but we were kind of told that we were writing for something, then a week before, it kinda changed to something else and it was like, we weren’t gonna have the choir, then we were gonna have the choir and it all kind of just about came together! But yeah, it was quite weird but an amazing place to play and an amazing place to hear that kind of music and absolutely rammed as well. It was done to promote some kind of youth scheme, or something like that, and it was chockablock, which was incredible. So yeah, it was an interesting place to start a project, definitely!
I was going to ask you actually Tommy, studying music and having to put the parameters of education around it, did it make it harder for you to stay freely creative? That’s another good question… no, I don’t think so; before I went to college I wasn’t a particularly good musician or composer at all, but I only realised I could compose after realising I wasn’t going to make it as a drummer! I realised I wasn’t good enough at drumming, so I’d have to try something else and so I started composing instead and I was much better at that, which was surprising. So no, I think Music College was a really inspiring place. I think it certainly can take people’s natural instincts away if taught badly, but my experience of Music College was mixed, but overwhelmingly positive. More than anything else, it set me up with the networks and contacts and all that sort of stuff, especially in a city like Leeds, which is full of musicians; at the time, there was about 150 people doing that Jazz course, or something like that. It was just ridiculous, but if you wanted to set up a project like Submotion Orchestra, or one of the other many projects that I set up in my time there, it was quite easy to do because you could just hand pick musicians, and everyone was up for playing, it was just great.
You have Ruby Wood as your permanent vocalist, whereas lots of bands of your kind of ilk bring in featured vocalists, but Ruby is a permanent member – how did you find her, and what made you keep her? Erm, well Ruby was the year below me at college and I hadn’t heard her sing before asking her to be in Submotion! Bit of a risky one, but she came to see a jazz gig I was playing at and sent me a message on Facebook afterwards basically saying how much she enjoyed the show and then it was around the time we started having some jam sessions with the original Submotion line-up and we were thinking that a female vocalist might work really, really well and as I say I had never heard her sing but I’d known about her through college and on a whim said, ‘do you wanna just come down, have a little sing and we’ll see what happens’ and it just went from there really.
That was a gamble that paid off! It really was, she is amazing, an incredible vocalist, really good to work with, really professional and just lovely. She is great.
Now Tommy, the festival circuit for you has been very fertile ground for building your fan-base because so many people kinda wander down and don’t know what to expect and fall in love with you guys. It’s been your calling card but has that been pretty instrumental in getting where you are now do you think? I would say so yeah; we did two seasons with the Chaiwalla Tent, the amazing platform for up and coming acts. They put on lots of interesting and varied bands all over the country and we did two summers with them when we played twenty festivals each summer and that set us up really well and as you say provided us with a really solid fan base across the country as well. I think, on a broader scale our calling card is that we play live. In the theme that we’re in there are very few bands. If you call it dubstep or electronic or whatever, by dubstep and electronica’s nature… it’s electronic! Finding a band that is trying to do that sort of thing live with trained musicians is quite rare. Yeah, I think that’s our main calling card and the tours that we’ve done - four UK tours over the last two years and we are doing another one in October and we’ll probably do one more next year as well. We love playing live, that’s what we do; I almost don’t feel like we need to put out albums, we would happily just play live.
For a lot of us in Norwich we stumbled upon you at Latitude, so we were really excited when we saw this gig coming up, we know that you are gonna bring an awesome show for us, but as an audience what can we bring for you? Haha, energy, good vibes, focus, weed if you’ve got any, I don’t know really! The live show that we bring is a lot more ballsy than the albums, I think. The first album was quite lush and quite warm and textural and quite beautiful in places but it’s not tear out at all, it doesn’t have like a real ballsy, sort of bubbling thing to it. The live show is much more in your face. It’s still subtle and it still has the texture and tenderness that parts of the album have but it’s more in your face, it’s more energetic. It’s good, it’s just a really good band; they are all amazing musicians so it’s just good fun. We have a lot of fun when we play, we love it and, like, I suppose the most exciting thing for us is knowing that we are gonna go on stage and it’s not gonna be the same as it’s been before; we make a concerted effort to kinda play around with stuff and to make changes and to keep it interesting and to keep it improvised. A lot of that depends on the audience and what reaction you get from the audience. So the louder and the more on point the audience the better the show will be. BRING IT!
Emma Garwood
The PLUGG presents Submotion Orchestra at OPEN Norwich on Saturday 29th September. For tickets go to Dogfish, Sevenwolves, OPEN or www.ueaticketbookings.co.uk. Read the full interview at Outlineonline.co.uk
Here’s an idea: don’t cut money from the Arts Council. Their vision of a live dubstep gig in York Minster pulled together various musicians from the Leeds jazz scene for a commissioned night, the fruits of which bore the seeds of Submotion Orchestra as we know them now, one of the country’s most talked about live acts. We can thank Arts Council, but none of it would’ve been possible without the band’s founder, Tommy Evans…
You’re playing the PLUGG night at Open, which has previously hosted Gilles Peterson, a man who’s been a big supporter of yours so far… Yeah, he’s been really supportive of us in the past. We did a Maida Vale session for him last year, or a couple of years ago, which was wicked and yeah, he’s played a lot of our tracks on his radio shows – he’s a nice guy.
So Tommy, where are you at the moment? Are you in Leeds? No, I’m in London. The band’s split now between Leeds and London, which is a bit of a difficult one; there’s three of us in London and four of them in Leeds. The band started in Leeds but we’ve kind of spread out since then. At one stage we were split between three cities, which was even worse, so there’s a lot of logistics to keep the whole operation moving forward. But yeah, I’m in London, I’m currently writing and gearing up for our tour in October, which we’re really looking forward to, as well as the gig in Norwich in September.
Are you writing for a new release? Well basically I write for a whole load of different projects, not just Submotion actually, but we’re writing material for the third Submotion album at the moment, even though the second one’s not actually out yet. The second one is out on the 8th of October and we’re all really excited about that; it’s sounding really cool and the singles have done really well and the remixes of the singles have been good and gone down really as well, which is great. So it’s a good start and we’re all really looking forward to touring that, but these things take such a long time to sort out in terms of the first idea you have for a tune, then the whole writing process, takes about four months – I mean, not every day for four months – but you build it very slowly then take it to the band, rehearse it up, then nine times out of ten the band don’t even like it! So if it makes it through that harsh filtering process, you then rehearse it up ready to play, then by the time you’ve played it out a few times and decided you want to stick it on the album, that whole process takes eighteen months, so we’re starting to write material from the third album before the second one has even come out, which is a slightly odd thing to be doing. But it’s cool; it keeps the focus and the forward momentum, which is what’s necessary.
You mentioned the filtering process - I did read actually, that you all pull it in different directions. Like, Ruby will pull it in a neo soul direction… What’s the one thing that brings you all together then, the one leveller between you all? That’s a really good question; I think probably everyone’s love of Jazz on a musical level. We are all trained Jazz musicians, so that’s the one thing we all share but then because Jazz is such a broad thing in itself, there are so many different levels to the sort of music we all like and there are lots of different crossovers between us all in terms of influence and training and stuff like that. I would say that Jazz is the one common thing and we have an awareness of playing in a conversational way with a focus on improvisation, an awareness of what is going on around you. None of us are really session players, as such, but we all do bits of session work; it’s basically a jazz band trying to play electronic produced music, a weird little combination that we find ourselves in and it kind of works, I think.
If you take that free form element from jazz, how do you then discipline yourself when you get into the studio where you have to rein things in a little bit, or do you rein things in at all? Yes and no - you would have to speak to our producer about that! To start with, with the live show, the way it works is all of the tunes, on one level have a very set structure, so they are a musical signpost the whole way through each tune, and various keys and stuff like that. And in between all of those signposts and between those keys/cues, there is a lot of freedom and a lot of space for interpretation for this kind of conversational jazzy approach. That is how we deal with the live show. In terms of what goes on, on the album, we have to knuckle down and tighten up for that. It’s not a question of trying to replicate produced music at all or electronic stuff, it’s certainly taking a lot of influence from bass-heavy electronic music. I mean, dubstep is often what we are closely associated with but I think we probably try and distance ourselves as far from that as possible right now. It’s that dancefloor mentality, that bass up mentality that we have in the studio, a more improvised approach than we take to the live show.
It’s interesting you say you are distancing yourself from dubstep; dubstep has almost distanced itself from itself hasn’t it? It’s one of the most quickly evolving genres I have ever experienced, but there was just something about the musical landscape a couple of years ago that started to produce different bands. I wanted to know what you were doing just before Submotion Orchestra? Did you also feel like it was getting to be the right time for you to do something like this? Before Submotion, everyone in the band was doing a range of different stuff from jazz to funk to soul to reggae to blues to dub to classical music to whatever, y’know, everything. Myself, I was and still am playing for a band called Gentlemen’s Dub Club. I also run my own orchestra, it’s a fifteen piece jazz orchestra that I compose and conduct for, and various other smaller jazz ensembles, composing for dance and film, and lots of other bits and bobs. But three, four years ago when I first had the idea for Submotion, I was playing a lot of dub music, a lot of quite underground, dubby, reggae raves and club nights and stuff, which was cool, and then a completely other world with all the jazz stuff. I thought there must be a way to bring these two worlds of music that I love together, ‘cause they are very different in a lot of ways, but there are some crossovers and it was around this time that I started hanging out with Dom Ruskspin, who’s the other guy that started the band, and we did a project in a cathedral in York, which was pretty weird, but got us thinking about doing some live dubstep thing. It was around the time that Burial was starting to take off and it was those kind of albums, like, there was just something in it that was like, ‘right, that would be really easy to do live’, like, it would be easy to replicate with fairly stripped back grooves and maybe some vocal on top. It felt like there was enough of the bass that I wanted to bring in, plus interesting harmony and complex elements from the jazz side of things that could actually work quite well. I wanted it to be quite a soulful, sexy, down-tempo project, which it kind of has turned out to be, although very different from what we originally envisioned it as.
I would love to have seen that gig at the York Minster – I think it’s great that the Arts Council in Yorkshire are forward thinking enough to commission that kind of project – was it an amazing gig? To be honest, it was incredibly chaotic. It was good, but it could have been incredible; the line-up was just ridiculous, I was live on drums, then there was a live bass and live synth bass player, viola, cello, trumpet, saxophone, two opera singers, the organist in the cathedral – so, like, the full organ playing in the cathedral at the same time. There was like a 16-piece African Gospel choir, the grand piano… it was just like the most weird ensemble! Myself and Dom had been asked to write the music for it, but we were kind of told that we were writing for something, then a week before, it kinda changed to something else and it was like, we weren’t gonna have the choir, then we were gonna have the choir and it all kind of just about came together! But yeah, it was quite weird but an amazing place to play and an amazing place to hear that kind of music and absolutely rammed as well. It was done to promote some kind of youth scheme, or something like that, and it was chockablock, which was incredible. So yeah, it was an interesting place to start a project, definitely!
I was going to ask you actually Tommy, studying music and having to put the parameters of education around it, did it make it harder for you to stay freely creative? That’s another good question… no, I don’t think so; before I went to college I wasn’t a particularly good musician or composer at all, but I only realised I could compose after realising I wasn’t going to make it as a drummer! I realised I wasn’t good enough at drumming, so I’d have to try something else and so I started composing instead and I was much better at that, which was surprising. So no, I think Music College was a really inspiring place. I think it certainly can take people’s natural instincts away if taught badly, but my experience of Music College was mixed, but overwhelmingly positive. More than anything else, it set me up with the networks and contacts and all that sort of stuff, especially in a city like Leeds, which is full of musicians; at the time, there was about 150 people doing that Jazz course, or something like that. It was just ridiculous, but if you wanted to set up a project like Submotion Orchestra, or one of the other many projects that I set up in my time there, it was quite easy to do because you could just hand pick musicians, and everyone was up for playing, it was just great.
You have Ruby Wood as your permanent vocalist, whereas lots of bands of your kind of ilk bring in featured vocalists, but Ruby is a permanent member – how did you find her, and what made you keep her? Erm, well Ruby was the year below me at college and I hadn’t heard her sing before asking her to be in Submotion! Bit of a risky one, but she came to see a jazz gig I was playing at and sent me a message on Facebook afterwards basically saying how much she enjoyed the show and then it was around the time we started having some jam sessions with the original Submotion line-up and we were thinking that a female vocalist might work really, really well and as I say I had never heard her sing but I’d known about her through college and on a whim said, ‘do you wanna just come down, have a little sing and we’ll see what happens’ and it just went from there really.
That was a gamble that paid off! It really was, she is amazing, an incredible vocalist, really good to work with, really professional and just lovely. She is great.
Now Tommy, the festival circuit for you has been very fertile ground for building your fan-base because so many people kinda wander down and don’t know what to expect and fall in love with you guys. It’s been your calling card but has that been pretty instrumental in getting where you are now do you think? I would say so yeah; we did two seasons with the Chaiwalla Tent, the amazing platform for up and coming acts. They put on lots of interesting and varied bands all over the country and we did two summers with them when we played twenty festivals each summer and that set us up really well and as you say provided us with a really solid fan base across the country as well. I think, on a broader scale our calling card is that we play live. In the theme that we’re in there are very few bands. If you call it dubstep or electronic or whatever, by dubstep and electronica’s nature… it’s electronic! Finding a band that is trying to do that sort of thing live with trained musicians is quite rare. Yeah, I think that’s our main calling card and the tours that we’ve done - four UK tours over the last two years and we are doing another one in October and we’ll probably do one more next year as well. We love playing live, that’s what we do; I almost don’t feel like we need to put out albums, we would happily just play live.
For a lot of us in Norwich we stumbled upon you at Latitude, so we were really excited when we saw this gig coming up, we know that you are gonna bring an awesome show for us, but as an audience what can we bring for you? Haha, energy, good vibes, focus, weed if you’ve got any, I don’t know really! The live show that we bring is a lot more ballsy than the albums, I think. The first album was quite lush and quite warm and textural and quite beautiful in places but it’s not tear out at all, it doesn’t have like a real ballsy, sort of bubbling thing to it. The live show is much more in your face. It’s still subtle and it still has the texture and tenderness that parts of the album have but it’s more in your face, it’s more energetic. It’s good, it’s just a really good band; they are all amazing musicians so it’s just good fun. We have a lot of fun when we play, we love it and, like, I suppose the most exciting thing for us is knowing that we are gonna go on stage and it’s not gonna be the same as it’s been before; we make a concerted effort to kinda play around with stuff and to make changes and to keep it interesting and to keep it improvised. A lot of that depends on the audience and what reaction you get from the audience. So the louder and the more on point the audience the better the show will be. BRING IT!
Emma Garwood
The PLUGG presents Submotion Orchestra at OPEN Norwich on Saturday 29th September. For tickets go to Dogfish, Sevenwolves, OPEN or www.ueaticketbookings.co.uk. Read the full interview at Outlineonline.co.uk